Google UK Search Market Share Dips to Lowest Level in 5 Years: 88%

Google has seen its share of the UK search market fall to its lowest level in five years as competition from rivals, notably Microsoft's Bing service, continue to erode its lead.

Figures from Experian show that in December 2012 Google controlled 88.35 percent of the search market, down from 89.12 percent the month before and down from 91.15 percent in December 2011.

By contrast, Microsoft's Bing service saw its year-on-year share improve by 1.15 percent from 3.84 to 4.99 percent of the market. Yahoo also improved, up to 3.58 percent, a rise of 0.86 percent over the twelve month period.

Although the figures show Google has lost market share to its rivals, its huge share, at almost nine-tenth of the entire market, underlines its dominance in the sector.

"Clearly, Google still maintains a huge competitive edge over the other search engines in the UK market," said digital insights manager for Experian, James Murray. "There are seven times more searches conducted on Google sites than on all the other search engines combined."

Nevertheless, he said Microsoft was making good ground and its deals with the like of Facebook were positive news.

"This is encouraging news for Microsoft as Bing once again starts to gain some momentum and traction in the UK search market," he said. "Bing's availability across multiple Microsoft devices and becoming the default search engine on sites such as Facebook has also contributed to an increase in market share as the way in which consumers use search engines continues to diversify."

In the U.S., Google's search market share stood at 66.7 percent in December, down from 67 percent in November and up from 65.4 percent in December 2011.

About the author

Dan Worth is the news editor for V3 having first joined the site as a reporter in November 2009. He specialises in a raft of areas including fixed and mobile telecoms, data protection, social media and government IT. Before joining V3 Dan covered communications technology, data handling and resilience in the emergency services sector on the BAPCO Journal.